[Fresh Ink] If It's That Warm, How Come It's So Darned Cold?

[Richard Menec]

If It's That Warm, How Come It's So Darned Cold?

An Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies within Near-Record Global Temperature

James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo

Overview. Public skepticism about global warming was reinforced by the 
extreme cold of December 2009 in the contiguous 48 United States and in much 
of Eurasia. The summer of 2009 was also unusually cool in the United States. 
But when a cold spell hits, we need to ask:

* Cold compared to what. Our memory of the past few winters? Winters of our 
childhood? Winters earlier in the 20th century?

* Cold where and for how long? Regional cold snaps are expected even with 
large global warming. Weather fluctuations can be 10, 20 or 30 degrees, much 
larger than average global warming.

* The reality of seasons. As the plot of Earth we live on turns away from 
the sun, in winter or at night, it cools off. That's true even with global 
warming, albeit not quite so much.

Before addressing these matters, we note that scientists reporting global 
warming have come under attack for a supposed conspiracy to manufacture 
evidence of global warming. Perhaps because some members of the public 
accept these charges as reality, vicious personal messages are sent to the 
principal scientists almost daily.

The spiral into an almost surrealistic situation with ad hominem attacks on 
scientists may have originated in part with vested interests who do not want 
society to address climate change. But there is more than that . including 
honest, wishful thinking that climate change is not really happening. But 
wishing does not alter facts.

The scientific method practically defines integrity. [Albert Einstein: "The 
right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part 
of what one has recognized to be true."  - Richard Feynman: "The first 
principle is that you must not fool yourself . and you are the easiest 
person to fool."].  All scientists make honest mistakes, but the scientific 
method is designed to correct them. The skeptical nature of the scientific 
method causes conclusions to be reexamined as new data appears.  Cases of 
deliberate fudging of data, of scientific fraud, are so rare that these 
infrequent episodes live in infamy for decades and even centuries.

We know of no cases of fraud in analyses of global temperature measurements. 
Despite unfounded accusations, we believe that our best approach is simply 
to continue to report our scientific results as clearly as possible. Most of 
the public continue to respect scientists for what they do and how they do 
it. We presume that most of the public can separate science from political 
commentary.

Our data show that 2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the 130 
years of near]global instrumental measurements . and the Southern 
Hemisphere had its warmest year in that entire period. Before discussing 
these data, and their reconciliation with regional cold anomalies, we must 
consider the time frame of comparison.

If we look back a century, we find cold anomalies that dwarf current ones. 
Figure 1 shows photos of people walking on Niagara Falls in 1911. Such an 
extreme cold snap is unimaginable today.  About a decade earlier, in 
February 1899, temperature fell to -2 F in Tallahassee, Florida, -9 F in 
Atlanta, Georgia -30 F in Erasmus, Tennessee, -47 F in Camp Clark, Nebraska, 
and -61 F in Fort Logan, Montana. The Mississippi River froze all the way to 
New Orleans, discharging ice into the Gulf of Mexico.

As we will show, climate is changing, especially during the past 30 years. 
The changes are perceptible, even though average temperature change is 
smaller than weather fluctuations. The answer to the simple question: "How 
come itfs so damned cold" turns out to be simple: "Because it's winter."

[Figure 1. Photographs of Niagara Falls in 1911.]

Full: 
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20100127_TemperatureFinal.pdf

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